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By Ajax the Great 

(Originally posted on the True Spirit of America Party blog)

DON'T DO "THE VOLCKER" AGAIN!

As the FERAL Reserve is committed to raising interest rates no matter the cost, even if it means deliberately engineering a recession, in an attempt to quash the worst inflation in 40 years, we would like to warn them as follows:

Stand. Down. NOW.  And prepare to reverse course a full 180 degrees, and soon.

And the same goes for their Quantitative Tightening (QT) as well, which of course amplifies the effect of raising interest rates by literally sucking money out of the economy, thus shrinking the money supply.  And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that, since there is exponentially more debt in the overall economy in 2022 compared with 1982, even a fairly modest increase in interest rates can have a much larger adverse effect now compared to back then.

Paul Volcker, former Fed chairman, (in)famously raised interest rates as high as 20% in the early 1980s, and it technically "worked" to quash inflation.  But it came at a terrible price:  not only a pair of really bad recessions with millions of jobs lost, but the resulting damage also inflicted serious sequelae upon the broader working class that persist to this day as well, both in the USA as well as abroad.  The first time, one could say it was naive at best.  Doing "The Volcker" a second time, however, would be downright stupid, if not utterly malicious, narcissistic, and even sadistic.

And the USA was actually one of the luckier countries.  Canada, for example, set interest rates even higher still, and kept them higher for longer than the USA, and they got even higher and more persistent unemployment as result, and inflation persisted longer as well.  It was a complete lose-lose proposition for them.  So don't do it again!

As the old adage goes, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.  And this particular tool is like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer, or burning down the house to roast a pig.  And worse, it is fundamentally the wrong tool for the job.  Most inflations, including this one especially, are caused by shortages of goods and services.  The only real cure is to solve the shortages, something higher interest rates simply cannot do no matter HOW high they are (at best it reduces demand and squeezes "inflationary psychology" out the system, and at worst it simply exacerbates the "cost-push" side of inflation when kept too high for too long).

And Rodger Malcolm Mitchell notes that governments can easily solve shortages by purchasing at a premium whatever goods or services happen to be in short supply, which incentives production, and then re-selling them (or giving them away) at a loss.  Higher interest rates do absolutely zilch for that.

Of course, we would not have gotten into this situation had our "leaders" not imposed  lockdowns in a futile attempt to control an airborne respiratory virus, and then tried to paper over the inevitable and predictable consequences by printing ludicrous and unprecedented amounts of money that overwhelmingly went toward further enriching the already ultra-rich.  Had we instead adopted the time-tested "flu strategy" from the get-go, with or without a more moderate stimulus package for We the People, we would not have gotten in this predicament in the first place.  Yes, there may have been some leftover problems in the bond markets and especially the repo market from 2019, and the virus would have been somewhat disruptive to the economy, (like the 1957 and 1968 flu pandemics), but nothing even in the same league as what happened with lockdowns.  And from what we have learned the hard way, death rates would have been about the same or even lower.

(No really, cumulative excess all-cause death rates for countries, states, and communities that largely ignored the virus, or at least eschewed lockdowns and more-restrictive NPIs, were actually within error bounds or even lower than for their much stricter neighbors or national/regional averages.)

When you try to "burn the village to save it", eventually the village will return the favor.  It is simply the law of cause and effect, also known as karma.  Sooner or later, you always reap what you sow.  And as the saying goes, hindsight is quite literally 2020.  Will the Fed answer the "clue phone"?

HAVE WE BEEN TOO HARSH ON THE DEGROWTH MOVEMENT?

In a recent previous article, we discussed the potential perils and pitfalls of the degrowth movement, and then at the end added an update.  We may have been a tad too harsh on some of the degrowth advocates as such, particularly Jason Hickel, by lumping them all together.  While our roadmaps for how to get there may diverge, our ultimate goals at least seems to be more or less the same as Hickel's (though that's not necessarily true of some of the other degrowth advocates out there).  Ditto for Charles Eisenstein and Kate Raworth, as well as Herman Daly, Joe Millwald-Hopkins and Yarnick Oswald.  They are some very insightful folks.

The TSAP still sees our own plan as being a more feasible roadmap towards that goal, as counterintuitive as that may sound.  Abundance is the one thing capitalism cannot survive for long, while forced austerity will not kill the beast, but rather merely weaken it a bit before it mutates further into a new variant of some sort due to selective pressure.

The system is the underlying problem here.  We essentially have three choices: 1) allow it to catastrophically fail in the future via business as usual, 2) force it to catastrophically fail sooner via austerity, or 3) humanely euthanize it via abundance ASAP.  And it's obvious which one we should choose.

So what exactly will post-capitalism ultimately look like when the dust finally settles?  The TSAP doesn't claim to know the details.  But eventually it will very likely organically evolve into something like a gift economy to one degree or another, as well as a steady-state economy of course.

One thing is absolutely certain, though:  if we are to create an economy that no longer has to "grow or die", we must first phase out and eventually abolish usury entirely.  That means that interest and all other kinds of fees for the mere use of money will need to be officially capped at ZERO, period.  To avoid seizing up the financial markets and crashing the economy, set a "sinking lid" at, say, ten percent APR, and then gradually lower the cap each year until zero is reached.  Usury has ultimately led to the financialization of the economy, inflation, worsening inequality, and just about every other social problem that has a name.  There is a reason why it used to be considered such a sin.  Let's make it history.

Also, as the late, great Buckminster Fuller famously noted all the way back in 1970:

We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living.

The glorified form of OCD that calls itself the Protestant Work Ethic (TM) will need to desist along with that other outmoded 19th century relic, conspicuous consumption, as they are both ultimately two sides of the same coin.  That means we will need a Universal Basic Income (UBI) with no strings attached as a prerequisite and precondition for any serious attempt at degrowth or post-growth.

Oh, and by the way:  unless the population also shrinks as well at least as fast as the economy does, degrowth is, ipso facto, fundamentally an exercise in futility.  That is true both from an economic perspective as well as an ecological perspective.  Fortunately, that can be done ethically and effectively via female empowerment and poverty reduction, as well as readily available access to birth control.  No coercion required.  The outmoded "everybody must procreate" myth needs to end yesterday as well.

And finally, before we can even consider degrowth in earnest, we would first need to get out of the destructive rut we are currently in.  Just like we needed to get out of the previous protracted rut of the Great Recession a decade ago.  The so-called "Green New Deal" is really only a lighter shade of brown as opposed to truly green, but it is nonetheless a decent way to get out of a rut while redesigning the economy for degrowth towards a steady-state economy.

So what are we waiting for?

UPDATE:  It should go without saying that the TSAP does NOT support anything even remotely resembling a lockdown, including, but not limited to, a "climate lockdown".  That is evil and illiberal to the max, and not only that, it wouldn't even work in the long run.  Thus, in no uncertain terms, we will support degrowth if and only if the individual rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights are fully guaranteed, and the disastrous response to the pandemic is not even remotely considered as a model.

ARE THE KIDS OK?  WE ALREADY KNOW THE ANSWER 

One year after the novel experimental gene therapies that "self-identify" as "vaccines" were "authorized" for children under 12, it looks like our suspicion was indeed correct that it was a big mistake to do so, and history will NOT be kind at all to those who did it.

The ever-insightful Dr. Peter McCullough got permanently banned from Twitter recently for daring to expose the unvarnished truth about what these jabs were doing to kids (and adults too, but especially kids).  Steve Kirsch, who also got banned long ago, posted on his Substack an excellent article about exactly what it was in his final tweet that got McCullough banned forever.  It was a link to a video on Rumble by the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation.  And it was apparently such an eye-opener that the powers that be felt it had to be forcibly silenced and memory-holed.  

But the funny thing about the truth is, it can't stay hidden and memory-holed forever.  Sooner or later, it always comes out.  Sunlight is the best disinfectant.